Varina Howell Davis (1826–1906)

Varina Howell Davis was the second wife of
Confederate president Jefferson
Davis and the First Lady of the Confederacy during the American Civil War (1861–1865). She
was manifestly ill-suited for this role because of her family background, education,
personality, physical appearance, and her fifteen-year antebellum residence in
Washington, D.C. (She once declared that the worst years of her life were spent in
the Confederate capital at Richmond while the happiest were in Washington.) A native of the urban
South, she always preferred the city to the country, and after her husband died in
1889, she moved to New York, where she resided until her death in 1906. MORE...

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Early Years

Varina Howell was born on May 7, 1826, in rural Louisiana where her parents,
William B. Howell and Margaret L. Kempe, of Natchez, Mississippi, were visiting
relatives. After distinguished service in the American Revolution (1775–1783), her
grandfather, Richard Howell, became governor of New Jersey in the 1790s. Her
father, who fought in the War of 1812, settled in Natchez and married Kempe, a
Virginia native whose father was an Irish immigrant. That Varina, born to a family
with roots in both the North and the South, should become the First Lady of the
Confederacy is a historical irony. She called herself a "half-breed."

William Howell was for many years a successful merchant until he went bankrupt
late in the 1830s. His daughter nevertheless received a superb education,
attending a boarding school in Philadelphia. (The tuition was probably paid for by
relatives.) While she was in school, she developed a lifelong fondness for her
Northern kinfolk.

When she returned to Natchez, Varina Howell
had few marriage prospects. Her father was unable to support his family or provide
a dowry, and she was better educated than most women of her generation. By the
standards of the mid-nineteenth century, she was not attractive—tall and thin,
with the olive complexion of her Welsh ancestors. In 1843, she met Jefferson Davis
at a Christmas party and quickly fell in love with him. He was a handsome older
man, a wealthy plantation owner, widower, and hero of the Mexican War (1846–1848).
He also had beautiful manners. After they married in 1845, she realized that he
had conventional attitudes about gender, and he expected his wife to submit to his
wishes; she also discovered that he revered the memory of his first spouse, Sarah
Knox Taylor, who died the year he married her. (Taylor was the daughter of U.S.
president Zachary Taylor,
who had disapproved of the couple's marriage.) As Davis admitted in her old age,
her husband had always loved his first wife more than he loved her.

But marriage to Jefferson Davis had a number of compensations for Varina Davis. He
became a professional politician, representing Mississippi as a Democrat in the
House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, serving as secretary of war in the
cabinet of U.S. president Franklin Pierce, and serving again in the U.S. Senate.
As a result, Davis spent most of the first fifteen years of her marriage in
Washington, D.C. She loved Washington. She made friends from all over the country,
including such prominent figures as the wife of Montgomery Blair, the Maryland
Democrat-turned-Republican who served as postmaster general in the administration
of U.S. president Abraham
Lincoln. In Washington, Davis was also close enough to regularly visit
her extended family in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

In the 1850s and 1860s, Davis gave birth to six surviving children, all of whom
she adored. She also enjoyed being rich. Her husband's fortune paid for a nice
home, nice clothing, and a nice carriage. Her political views were nevertheless
more moderate than those of her husband. She once remarked that slaves were "human
beings with their frailties," while Jefferson Davis publicly compared slaves to
animals. She maintained friendships with people from both political parties, even
as he became more aggressively proslavery and more partisan in the 1850s.

Secession and War

Davis was deeply alarmed by the secession
crisis of 1860–1861. By the summer of 1860, she knew that her husband was being
talked about as a possible head of the seceded states, and she told a friend that
the "whole thing is bound to be a failure." Years later she said that her husband
was not suited for political office and did not have the ability to compromise.
She was both pro-Union and proslavery, so if she had had the right, she probably
would have voted for the pro-Union Southerner John Bell in the presidential
election of 1860.

When her husband was appointed Confederate president in 1861, she reluctantly
followed him to the South. In June 1861, she confided to her mother that the South
did not have the resources to win the war, but she had to do her duty; when it was
all over, she said, she would "run with the rest." In Richmond, her cordial
remarks about her Northern friends and relatives made her unpopular, as did the
rumor that she corresponded with those friends and relatives—a charge that was, in
fact, true. She had relatives in both armies, and she visited the wounded,
Northern and Southern, in Richmond hospitals. In 1862, she remarked in a private
letter that if the South lost the war, it would be because God willed it.

As First Lady, Davis was responsible for hosting many social events at the
Confederate White House. She followed Washington etiquette, holding open
receptions for dozens of people as well as small dinner parties, and she dressed
in tasteful, conservative clothes. But her tenure was dogged by controversies. Her
political loyalties were suspect from the beginning, of course. Her conversation,
filled with literary references, baffled some of her peers. Her olive complexion
was considered unattractive, and some white Richmonders compared her to a mulatto
or an Indian "squaw." She also had pressing responsibilities running the
household. She supervised approximately twenty workers, white and black, enslaved
and free, and she hosted many relatives from her husband's family and her own
family. Both of the Davises were crushed by the death of their son Joseph, age
five, who broke his neck in a fall from a balcony in 1864.

After 1865

As Union troops approached the capital,
the Davises fled Richmond in the spring of 1865, but they were captured in Georgia
in May. The postwar years were bleak, marked by financial struggle, more family
deaths, and various newspaper scandals. Jefferson Davis served two years in prison
at Fort Monroe before the
federal government released him on bail; he never took the oath of allegiance to
the United States. His Mississippi plantation had been confiscated, so he tried to
find a new job. The Davises moved to England, where the former president started a
commission house, but the business collapsed, so the Davises returned to United
States. In Memphis, Tennessee, he worked for an insurance company, which went
bankrupt. The widow Sarah Dorsey then invited him to live at her estate, Beauvoir,
in rural Mississippi, and late in the 1870s, she bequeathed the property to
Jefferson Davis. Two of the Davis sons died, one from diphtheria and the other
from yellow fever. Furthermore, Jefferson Davis fell in love with Virginia Clay,
wife of a former Confederate official. He wrote passionate letters to her for
three years, and in 1871 after he was discovered on a train with an unidentified
woman (possibly Clay), the story appeared in newspapers all over the United
States. The legal system made divorce very difficult, however, and divorce had
such a stigma that neither one of the Davises discussed it in writing.

After 1865, the Davises were still famous, celebrities in the modern sense, and
their letters, articles of clothing, and knickknacks became souvenirs in museums
all over the country. Through the 1870s and 1880s, Jefferson Davis was asked to
make public appearances at soldiers' reunions, monument dedications, and state
fairs. When his youngest daughter, Varina Anne Davis, called "Winnie," reached her
twenties, she began making public appearances with her father, earning the
nickname "Daughter of the Confederacy." While they lived at Beauvoir, the Davises
had little privacy. Dozens of people arrived every year to meet Jefferson
Davis—veterans, newspaper reporters, curious strangers—and some of them wanted to
talk to Varina Davis, too. She was a gracious hostess, but she admitted to a
friend that she tired of the throng of visitors. Moreover, she felt that Beauvoir
was Sarah Dorsey's house, and she had always preferred urban life to country
living. After Jefferson Davis died of pneumonia in 1889, Davis and her daughter
Winnie Davis moved to New York City.

A New Yorker

The widow Davis lived in Gotham for the
rest of her life. She supported herself by writing articles for Joseph Pulitzer's
New York World, while Winnie Davis published several
moderately successful novels. Mother and daughter led a middle-class lifestyle,
residing in apartment-hotels in Manhattan, receiving Northern relatives, and
making new friends from all sections and all social backgrounds. When conservative
white southerners criticized her behavior, she explained to the press that she
felt uncomfortable at Beauvoir, and because her husband had left her little
property, she was forced to work for a living. She did not mention another key
reason: she enjoyed living in the great metropolis. Since New York was full of
famous people, she usually could go about her day unnoticed by strangers. The city
of Richmond offered her a house free of charge, but she politely refused. When
Winnie Davis died of a fever in 1898, a devastating personal loss, she received
sympathy messages from citizens all over the country. She also received more calls
to return to the South but again declined.

In New York, she became an open advocate of regional reconciliation. She met Julia
Dent Grant, the widow of Union general and U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant, by accident in 1893 at a resort
on the Hudson River, and the two women became friends. They had a good deal in
common and genuinely liked each other. Their friendship was celebrated in much of
the national press, although it was ignored by the most conservative white
southerners. Davis attended reunions of veterans from both armies, and she was a
member of both the Daughters of the American Revolution and the United Daughters
of the Confederacy. In 1901, she met the African American leader Booker T. Washington in
New York, and they had a brief, civil conversation. The same year, she proclaimed
in an article in the New York World that God "in His
wisdom" had allowed the North to prevail and the United States to survive, stating
in public what she said in private in 1862.

She enjoyed her old age in the big city, hosting visitors, writing letters,
reading books, going to the theater, and taking a daily ride in her carriage
through Central Park. In October 1906, she contracted pneumonia and died, on
October 16, in her apartment overlooking Central Park. She was eighty years old.
Varina Howell Davis was buried in Richmond, her tombstone reading, "At Peace."

Time Line

May 26, 1826
- Varina Howell is born in rural Louisiana.

February 26, 1845
- Jefferson Davis, after winning election to the U.S. House of Representatives, marries Varina Howell.

February 9, 1861
- Jefferson Davis is elected provisional president of the newly formed Confederate States of America by a convention in Montgomery, Alabama.

February 18, 1861
- Jefferson Davis is inaugurated as the provisional president of the Confederacy in Montgomery, Alabama, declaring that the "South is determined to maintain her position, and make all who oppose her smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel."

May 26–29, 1861
- The Confederate capital relocates from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond.

June 1861
- Varina Davis, wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, tells her mother the Confederacy does not have the resources to win the Civil War.

July 6, 1862
- Varina Davis tells her husband, Confederate president Jefferson Davis, that if the Union wins the Civil War, then it will have been God's will.

April 30, 1864
- Five-year-old Joseph E. Davis, son of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, is mortally injured in a fall from the balcony of the Confederate White House in Richmond.